Presentation and launch: Stonehill Jewish Music Collection, NYC, 13 May 2015
Special Launch Event for the Stonehill Jewish Music Collection. Mark your calendar for an event celebrating the launch of a new website http://www.ctmd.org/stonehill.htm) for the Ben Stonehill Jewish Song Collection!
Wed., May 13, 7pm–8:30pm
Hotel Marseilles,
230 West 103 Street (SW corner of West 103rd Street and Broadway).
Manhattan, NY
Admission is free!
In 1948, only 3 years after the war, Ben Stonehill recorded over a thousand songs from Holocaust survivors temporarily housed at the Hotel Marseilles after arriving in America. And on May 13, at this very hotel, we will be able to listen to some of the rare and important songs Stonehill captured for posterity. Though Stonehill passed away in 1964, we will hear his voice describing what he saw and heard in that lobby.
The evening will feature a presentation by Yiddish specialist and scholar Miriam Isaacs, Ph.D., herself born in a German DP camp. She has worked with CTMD to create a website which makes available the recordings and lyrics to many of these songs. Isaacs will describe the history and contents of the site and will play a few excerpts of the original songs, sung by men, women and children, mainly in Yiddish, but also Russian and Hebrew. Collectively, this body of song constitutes a haunting testimony to survivors' resilience, courage and humor.
We are thrilled that Masha Leon, one of the singers recorded at the time by Stonehill, will be joining us to share her experience and grace us with a song! A number of the songs will come alive as we will listen to contemporary singers in a zingeray (song-sharing session), featuring several wonderful exponents of traditional Yiddish and Russian song, including Isaacs, Carol Freeman, Esther Gottesman, Craig Packard, and Binyumen Schaechter.
The event will be followed by a reception with light refreshments. Programmed in partnership with the Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center. We are grateful for the assistance of ethnomusicologist Bret Werb of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lorin Sklamberg of the YIVO Institute, Paula Teitelbaum, Binyumin Schaechter, Craig Packard and Itzik Gottesman for their assistance with this project, as well as the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marinus and Minna B. Koster Foundation and the Atran Foundation.